Some Girls: My Life in a Harem (27 page)

One thing they often tell adopted children is, Your birth mother loved you so very much that she gave you away so you could have a better life. That may be true. It may also be true that if she had loved you just a little bit more, she would have kept you.

I didn’t love my baby enough. But I did love her in those last moments. I could feel her with me. And in my head floated the “stages-of-development” fetuses, the plaster casts on display in the Museum of Natural History, the exhibit my father had taken me to see as a child, the miracle of life.

What did she look like? Her eyelids. Her ears. Her hands folded over her tiny, beating heart.

 

I lay on the table in the small procedure room with my legs strapped into stirrups, my gown hiked up to my waist, and a three-inch square of paper towel draped across the top of my thighs. I’ve always had difficult veins. The anesthesiologist sighed impatiently and stuck me several times.

“If you would just stop shaking, I could get this needle in.”

Silent tears streamed across my temples and into my hairline. Finally, I felt the sting in the crook of my elbow and then the swell at the back of my throat and then the sleepy warmth.

In the moment before the twilight sleep took me into nothingness, I dreamed of the hospital, of my father. You don’t see a vein; you feel a vein. It was a recurring dream, grounded at least partly in memory.

At age twelve I had ovarian cysts so painful that the doctors almost removed my appendix. As a result, I was in and out of the hospital, but I didn’t mind. I liked the hospital better than school. People took care of me and brought me chocolate bars and I ate floppy string beans and white bread with butter packets and watched TV all day in my pajamas. My dad took off work to stay there with me. He also liked hospitals. Medicine was his true love. He would have been a doctor but for his inability to concentrate, his lack of patience, his poor bedside manner. He says it’s why he wound up in finance instead.

An inept medical tech stabbed at my arm with a needle. This was my least favorite part about the hospital. I looked in the other direction, the same silent tears running down my face. My father watched from the other side of the room until his rage overtook his sense of decorum and he lifted the tech off his seat by the collar of his lab coat and threw him up against the wall. He held the man there by his throat and pointed an emphatic finger a centimeter away from the tech’s nose.

“You don’t see a vein, you fucking moron. You feel a vein.”

He dropped the man and sat beside me, gently and capably feeling for the vein in the hollow of my elbow before inserting the IV catheter in one try.

I don’t know if this occurrence was a hallucination or the real thing, but I know that in my dream replay of that moment, I love my dad so much.

Andy picked me up at the clinic. He cried in the elevator when he saw my face, but he dropped me at home and went back to work. When he came back later that night, he brought me Ben & Jerry’s and moved the television into the bedroom, breaking my adamant no-television-in-the-bedroom rule. It hurt. It did not feel like cramps, as they had said it would. It didn’t feel like cramps at all. It felt like something was clawing its way out of me.

I bled through pad after pad. Andy found a friend who had some Vicodin. I took one. Then I took another, and was magically enveloped in a soft cloud of okay that floated me into a mercifully dreamless sleep.

When I woke, a brick-red stain, brown at the dried edges, was spread out on the sheet beneath me. Something was wrong. I took two more Vicodin and thought, If I just had a Vicodin tree, a never-ending supply, my problems would all be solved, would melt into the ground like butter into toast.

When by the afternoon the bleeding hadn’t stopped, I called my doctor and left a message. I considered a trip to the emergency room, but the thought of a New York emergency room on a Saturday afternoon drove me back to the Vicodin bottle and back into bed, towels folded underneath me. It took a few days before the bleeding finally eased. The doctor told me it was caused by something called “retained products,” pieces of tissue that hadn’t been properly removed. Retained products. You try to scoop out the consequences of your actions but the residue hangs on. She called it harmless—painful and disturbing, but ultimately harmless. I wonder sometimes now—after injecting countless syringes full of powerful hormones into my stomach, after going to clinic after clinic for a series of fertility procedures straight out of the movie
Species
, all of them failing—if she was wrong.

I curled around a heating pad and watched
Law & Order.
I watched it and then I just kept watching. The doctor at the clinic had said that I would be up and around in a day or two, so Andy couldn’t really understand why I stayed in bed for two weeks watching television. It wasn’t the pain. That went away after a few days. And the Vicodin went away a few days after that and in place of warm nothingness I found a pit, a crater, a black hole, the sides of it lined with retained products.

I wanted to fall into that black hole and become so small that the force of the compression itself would send me exploding into a billion pieces, would explode my arrogance and my careless decisions, explode the unshakable sadness, the heavy stone tied around my throat from the inside. I wanted to give up and just explode the self I couldn’t quite find, flailing and unwise. My own big bang. Please, I begged whomever, whatever, let me just fall apart and start over.

 

 

 

 

H
er name was Carrie Gardner. It sounded perky and Midwestern and plain, the name of an airline ticket-counter worker, a waitress at Outback Steakhouse, a kindergarten teacher.

Slowly and on shaky legs, I’d been emerging from my funk for a few weeks. At Penny’s behest, I had begun seeing a therapist named Paul Pavel. I rode the A train every day to his uptown apartment. He was a man of uncommon hope, a man who rescued half-frozen animals from Central Park in the wintertime, a man who had himself been rescued half-frozen in the snow by American soldiers after the liberation of Auschwitz. Paul reached his hand, his tattooed arm, out to me and defrosted me as well. He led me out of the darkest part of the depression that had come hard on the heels of my abortion.

Paul was convinced, among other things, that my biological origins were of far greater significance to me than I was willing to admit. He made a connection between the loss of my birth mother and my crippling guilt over my abortion. And just as my therapy was excavating all this, Johnny called me with my birth mother’s name.

Johnny was home for the High Holidays from yet another boarding school. As usual, I wouldn’t be observing the holidays except to call my parents and wish them
l’shanah tovah
: for a good year. And while I didn’t miss the hypocrisy, the moneyed religion, the rigidity of the doctrine, I felt a sadness I couldn’t put my finger on. Maybe the holidays made me yearn for a time when I had believed in something as unlikely as God, or a time when I had believed that I was a part of something.

There had once been High Holidays when distant cousins swarmed me in the temple lobby with open arms and lipsticked smiles, smelling of Chanel No. 5. I remember pressing my face into new wool suits that were too warm for a sunny September New Jersey day. I remember sneaking out of the children’s service downstairs and walking around the temple grounds while the sun shone through the turning leaves, colorful and translucent as stained glass. I remember cut apples dipped in honey, so sweet they hurt your teeth.

Johnny, who ten years later would be so religious he would have all these things and more, was at the time a rather gifted criminal. Our parents had always told us that they had no information about our biological parents. The only birth certificates we ever saw listed our adoptive parents as our parents. Period. Any previous records had been sealed permanently. The pieces of paper were insistent and so were my parents. Johnny called that day to tell me that he had uncovered evidence discrediting my parents’ story.

My parents did, in fact, have information about our birth parents. Johnny had found it by breaking into a lock box. He uncovered detailed information about himself, as he was younger and benefited from more relaxed adoption laws. But for me, Johnny had found a name—a name and a brief story pieced together from an attorney’s correspondence, and an old address.

Everything I know about what Johnny found I know from my memory of our conversation. I have never seen the papers with my own eyes. I’m sure my parents would show them to me now, but I can’t bring myself to ask. It is still a sore spot for them and a source of guilt for me. I’m guilty that we snooped, that we cared in the first place. I am ashamed, illogically, to have discovered that they lied to us.

I vaguely remember Johnny telling me that there were some newspaper clippings about a birth father who tried later to regain custody. But maybe this was a conflation of my life with an episode of
Law & Order
or a CNN sound bite. It was such a strange moment that I can’t remember exactly what he said. But I do remember that there was confirmation of a story my parents had always told me. I expected to discover that this story had been a lie, too, but it wasn’t. My parents had been telling the truth when they told me that my birth mother had been a ballerina. I realized how much I had clung to this one little thing only when its confirmation flooded me with a sense of profound relief.

I wrote the name and the Highland Park, Illinois, address on a piece of paper and put it in a drawer. Somewhere there was a woman to whom this name belonged, who had once written this address on the official forms she had signed when she gave her baby away. My music-box mother, locked up safely with satin lining and a perpetual soundtrack, a princess transmuted by a spell into the body of a swan. Carrie Gardner. An airline ticket-counter worker, a waitress at Outback Steakhouse, a kindergarten teacher. A name that wasn’t an answer, it was a question, a question to which I decided to seek the answer; I just wasn’t sure how yet.

 

I had a habit during that time of browsing one of New York’s many international-magazine stands, buying a few beautiful and unfamiliar glossies and reading them at a café, frequently Café Orlin, on Eighth Street. Before there were Ed Hardy T-shirts (and bottled water and office supplies and motorcycles and shower curtains), Don Ed Hardy was an artist who published a beautiful art magazine called
Tattootime.
Once I picked up the magazine, I was hooked. Each
Tattootime
had a theme: New Tribalism, Life and Death Tattoos, Art from the Heart, Music and Sea Tattoos. As it does with most people who are drawn to tattoos, the imagery and the history of tattooing struck a chord in my soul. The San Francisco tattoo artist who has done most of my work says that the tattoo gods announce themselves to you when it’s time.

I looked at the people in the pages of
Tattootime
and felt an instant camaraderie. I, too, was a pirate, a sailor, a prostitute, a gangster, a sideshow attraction, but nobody knew it. Nobody saw it. It occurred to me that I’d have to achieve a deeper level of authenticity in how I was living or wind up a shapeshifter—will do whatever—for the rest of my life.

The tattoo gods announced themselves to me. It was nothing less dramatic than that. No sooner had I begun to seek my first tattoo than I had a plan for what I wanted my whole body to look like. With my story writ large on the surface of my skin, I would no longer be tempted to fool people into thinking that I was normal. Tattooing was going to be my own radical statement about permanence and impermanence. It was the scarlet letter that I would proudly embroider across my chest.

Reading
Tattootime
, I learned that across the island of Borneo, in the rainforest of the Sarawak, not far at all from the royal yachts and palaces and car collections of Brunei, live the Maori tribesmen, who tattoo their bodies from head to toe using a bone chisel. The spiraling, swirling, black-ink tattoos have a sacred significance. The Maori warriors emblazon their ferocity on their skin. Their tribal designs have migrated to the West and shown up on the arms of weightlifters in Venice Beach and street punks in Tompkins Square Park. While I had sat in the palace in Brunei and spun stories for Robin that evaporated into the air, miles away tribesmen were embedding their stories into their skin.